The government has been defeated by the House of Lords over the retention of DNA and fingerprints.
The Lords voted 161 to 150 for a Conservative amendment to the Counter-Terrorism Bill, which would create a process for innocent people to apply to have their DNA and fingerprints removed from the national databases.
Baroness Hanham, who proposed the amendment, said she was aiming to spark a national debate. "There is no transparency in the current situation and the dice are severely loaded against innocent people being able to ensure that their most personal details are not kept indefinitely following their exclusion, either by a court or following a decision that there is no reason for them to be involved further in any inquiry," she told the Lords on 4 November, 2008.
She said that at present, "the initial response to a request for destruction is an automatic refusal", with the police guidelines recommending that those applying are automatically refused, although chief police officers have the discretion to do this in exceptional cases. "The balance at present is not in favour of the innocent," she concluded.
Lord West of Spithead replied that the inclusion of a DNA profile on the database does not indicate innocence or guilt. He said the requirement to destroy samples from those acquitted or those against whom charges had been dropped followed two Court of Appeal cases which did not lead to convictions due to the previous rules.
Baroness Hanham replied: "Those who are innocent should not be on any database. They should not be under the eye of the law of this country. They are innocent. They have no truck with the law and their DNA should not passed to Europe for whatever reason simply because it is a chunk of information that the police hold."
The UK's National DNA Database is one of the biggest in the world. On 30 June, it held 4,503,186 records, representing more than seven percent of the population. On 31 March, the database included 857,366 people who did not have a current criminal record on the Police National Computer, according to a parliamentary written answer provided on 4 November.
A current European court case, in which two Britons are challenging the retention of their DNA, may also force a change in government policy.
Talkback
I know the clarion call, orchestrated by our NuLabor guardians of truth fairness and light, is that the Lords must be reformed. Just bear in mind that if the Upper House was formed in the same way as the lower house, it would almost certainly be composed of the same people and think and therefore vote in the same way. It would therefore be a complete waste of time and money because it's job is to do exactly this; stand in the way of juggernaut governments like this one and slow the whole thing down and try and make them do a better job.
Laws are created in minutes, but stay on the books for decades if not for ever. Fast law is almost always bad law.
For many years our ancestors fought, and many died, for freedom from oppression - and this is certainly not freedom. The government, supposedly under the supervision of Parliament, has become arrogant and oppressive with little or no regard to the people it supposedly is working for.
While a criminal should be identifiable - although how long criminal ID data should be retained is debateable - there is no justification for ID data of the non-convicted to be held unless being used in actual investigations.